The great global warming swindle

What if the great global warming swindle were true?

All the climate change skeptics and those with climate change denial would be saying, “I told you so” as they patted each other on the back.

Some politicians would be red-faced. Only they are used to that feeling and most will spin the result to survive and fight in another election. It is what they do.

Most of us would just be confused.

A swindle is a deliberate attempt to mislead for personal gain. When a hustler tries to sell an unwanted trinket to an unsuspecting tourist by claiming it is an ancient artifact; that is a swindle. A deception.

Fear of global warming effects is not a swindle.

Rising sea levels, droughts, cyclones and the like are real enough and undesirable. It should not be a surprise that we want to avoid them.

The great global warming swindle is the acceptance that human actions have caused global warming and then claiming that we can do something about it.

Some say that the use of information that shows levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are rising, together with loose numbers on temperature and weather patterns to assume that one (rising greenhouse gas concentrations) causes the other (climate change) is itself a swindle. The link may be plausible but there is no evidence of cause and effect.

There are a few who say the whole thing is just a climate change hoax

Some people believe there is enough evidence that human activity has caused global warming.

So far this is not really a swindle. The evidence is reasonable, even compelling, and there is no obvious gain in gaming it.

The con is the implicit assumption that if we caused it, then we can fix it.

Only to fix it we have to change some activities. We have to swindle some folk out of the opportunity to make money or even their liberty to do what they like without any real evidence that it will work.

We have proposed greenhouse gas emissions reduction and set them into international conventions and national policies. Even brought in a carbon price and created markets to trade carbon as a commodity.

This is the great global warming swindle. Some personal liberty must be sacrificed and a cost incurred for what may be a spurious argument, an unproven solution to something that may or may not be real, or if it is real, could easily be caused by something else.

We already know that climate change is not just about greenhouse gases because there are variations or cycles in

• solar luminosity (power of the sun)
• Earth’s orbit
• solar activity pulses (itself a function of galactic density waves impacting the sun’s core)
• interplanetary magnetic field strength
• cosmic ray intensity
• configuration of the continents
• ocean currents
• cloud cover in the Earth’s atmosphere

that can also cause climate change.

Anything that impinges on personal liberty touches a nerve in most of us. We accept some limits on our behaviour if there is a collective good. Only we need to be sure of the collective good. We also need to be convinced that the curtailed behaviour was bad.

Not so easy if there is doubt about the bad effects of the action, and that stopping that behaviour has benefit.

Swindle is a provocative word. But you can see why it has been thrown at climate change.

the conundrum

Just like it is wise to at least listen to the climate change skeptics and to consider the notion of a climate change hoax , so the idea of the great global warming swindle should not be dismissed out of hand.

More reading from CCW

Environmental Issues for Real by Dr J. Mark Dangerfield looks at some of the obvious, and some of the not so obvious, challenges for a growing human population living as we do in a finite world.

Only this time it's not about the impending disasters or the guilt or the blame.

This time, it’s 10 brief essays that are about the bigger picture. In less than an hour you could glimpse something different, a view that we can only see when we take a fresh look.

Download your copy at Smashwords

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